Giving heritage a boost
Melbourne building and engineering team Chiminello Building Services has teamed up with hydraulic power specialists Enerpac to restore the structural integrity of a heritage school building that was slumping on its crumbling foundations.
Chiminello, working with project manager Sinclair Knight Merz, used a sacrificial battery of 12 Enerpac hydraulic jacks to lift and permanently eliminate damage to the 140-year-old original building of Burwood East primary school. “The project looked a bit like a Roman archaeological excavation for a while because we had to dig trenches up to 2.5m deep alongside the foundations to gain access to them,” says Martin Chiminello, Chiminello Building Service’s managing director.
After gaining access to the crumbing foundations, Chiminello began the painstaking process of replacing them in sections one metre long, into which were fitted horizontally split concrete blocks each containing an Enerpac 10t capacity cylinder. The cylinders were actuated simultaneously to lift the wall back into its original position and were then fitted with fabricated lifting plates on top of their plungers which were locked off in the correct position and the steel blocks around them fitted with steel shins and filled with concrete to become part of a solid new foundation.
“Originally when we looked at the job we were considering it as a stabilisation project but it became evident that a full remedial operation was required,” says Chiminello. “To just stabilise the building as it was would have been leaving the door open to possible deterioration years down the line. None of us wanted that, because a fine old heritage building could ultimately have been compromised.”
Source: Building Products News.
3-Dec-2003